According to Liah Greenfeld, author of Mind, Modernity, Madness, “culture is an empirical reality of the first order in human life – that it, in the most profound sense of the word makes us human and defines …

When Robert Lemelson, an anthropologist, filmmaker, and research professor at UCLA, recently visited the George Washington University to speak at a conference on how ethnographic films can help us understand torture, I had to request an interview. I confess—I have long been a fan of Lemelson’s films, which I have seen screened at meetings as large as those …